Been reading the past few posts in here. Just wanna get my thoughts down on paper...er...print. i teod to the liken the Chase, formats, past and now, as a style that a driver/team should have to be sucessful in them. The orihinal format in my book, was more about consistency. You didn't have to go out and win every week to be competitive, if you ran top 5 or top 10, you had a decent chance of making it to Homestead with a shot, since you avoided catastrophy, and were rewarded with keeping your cars intact. The new format heavily focuses on wins, not just in the regular season, but in the final ten races as well. We saw with Kurt Busch last year, he ran up front for most of the season, and had many top fives and tens. Come Martinsville, that simply wasn't enough. The points were too close to run top ten, you wither had to finish 2nd or 3rd, or go out and win a race. As much as we all gripe about this format, if you want to win the Championship, you need to be winning races. Pulling a Jimmie Johnson and finishing fourth every week simply isn't going to cut it anymore.
Regarding Kyle Busch, I try not to look at it as a Championship for him, but for his team. We all saw what the pit crew, Adam Stephens, and the whole of JGR went through. Sure, they had some rough races, but they had some phenominal races before Busch came back; take the Martinsville spring race for example. Ragan, who I belive finished 5th, had a chance to win that race, and he was a relife driver! I mean, those guys busted their rear ends waiting for Kyle to get in the car again, and judging by the way he preformed, he wanted to be in that car again. Being out of the thing fot four months seemed to give him a new appriciation on life and what he does.
Buech has always been a super agressive driver. He was, and still isn't, happy with finishing second. He knows he can win, and pushes himself to do so, even when the car can't. Remember how I said that wins matter more than ever? Well, there's your reasoning. Put a guy who refuses to lose in a spot where he has to win, and he'll show you what he's made of. Put a consistant guy like Johnson in a spot where he has to be consistent, and that's he'll do. We saw that from '05 to '11. Think of it like a baseball game. If you change it from three strike outs to one strike out, you've changed the rule to were someone will excel, other will not. I believe that's exactly what we've seen over the course of the past few years.
Sorry about the ramble, but those are just my feelings on the matter.
). Teams still vary pit stop in speed as F1 clearly shows, also f1 doesn't have fueling so the comparison is a miss.
